Seminci-premiered ‘The Bookshop’ wins Best Film at 2018 Goya awards

02/04/2018.- It was one of the hot favourites and it lived up to the expectation: premiered after the opening gala of the Valladolid Festival’s 62nd edition, The Bookshop bagged last night (Sat. 3 Feb) the Best Film prize during the 2018 Goya awards ceremony. It moreover earned Isabel Coixet her second Big Head in the Best Director category, a distinction she had already received in 2005 for The Secret Life of Words. The Catalan filmmaker also scooped another Goya Award in a category —Best Adapted Screenplay— where she had already been a winnerin 2003 with My Life Without Me. Co-produced by Spain, UK and Germany, The Bookshop adapts the homonymous novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, a book whose screen version, as stated by the director in the course of her visit to Valladolid, she had wanted to “pull off” ever since she read the story.

Coixet shared the award-giving ceremony organised by Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences with The Bookshop’s leading performers, British actors Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy, who had been respectively nominated for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor awards. It was Nighy who joined the film director in her visit to the Valladolid Festival, where he referred to the part of Mr. Brundish as «one of the best acting jobs» in the whole of his career. He moreover added that “When I read the screenplay, I thought it was a brilliant adaptation”. During the film’s press conference at Seminci, Nighy had high praise for Coixet: “She made me feel free and self-confident. She brings a special connection to the cast, a more intimate relationship and a huge respect, and that is something you can’t just feign». The film’s presentation in Valladolid was also attended by The Bookshop’s producers Jaime Banacolocha and Adolfo Blanco, who also appeared on stage last night at the Madrid Marriott Auditorium Hotel.

‘The Bookshop’ premiere at the opening of 62nd Seminci

Also screened during the 62nd Valladolid Film Festival, Summer 1993 was another film to harvest a prize in last night’s edition of the Goya awards. Scheduled in Valladolid ‘17 in fest retrospectives Spanish Cinema and Supernovas, this feature-length movie has now earned Carla Simón the First Time Director award. Additionally, David Verdaguer and Bruna Cusí respectively won the awards in the Best Supporting Actor and Best Breakthrough Performance (Actress) categories. In turn, Nathalie Poza was singled out as Best Actress for her role in Lino Escalera’s first film Can’t Say Goodbye, also screened during last year’s edition of Seminci in the section devoted to the domestic film industry.

Laura Ferrés at 62nd Seminci

The ceremony also brought a new success for Laura Ferrés’s Los desheredados, which won the award to the Best Documentary Short. The film entered the Official Section of the 62nd Valladolid Film Festival and portrays the director’s own father when at the age of 53 he is forced to face the end of the family business, a small bus company. While presenting her work in Seminci, Ferrés pointed out that in her second short film she had tried to “give voice to the feelings of a man who remains dignified in the face of adversity”. “It is half way between documentary and fiction: I like to work with facts, yet staging them in a way that is more characteristic of fiction,” said Ferrés, who in this short film directed not just her dad Pere, but her grandmother Mari Álvarez as well. Los desheredados reached the Valladolid Festival and the Goya nominations with another important win under its belt: the Leica Cine Discovery Prize to the Best Short Film awarded by Cannes’ International Critics’ Week.